A Woman Named Smith - Marie Conway Oemler (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

have you come near Hynds House, at this hour of the day? He, he, he! I know, I know!"

Lost in astonishment, Jelnik remained staring up at her. The apparition of this venerable vixen, who had hated Richard's son and now hated him of a later generation, who had seen those that had talked to Richard himself in his ill-fated lifetime, so stirred his imagination that it deprived him of utterance. All he could do was to stand still and stare and stare and stare. He had never seen anybody so old—she was nearly a hundred, and looked a thousand—and he stared at the old, old, wrinkled, yellow face, the unhuman face, in which the beady black eyes burned with wicked fire; at the nearly bald head, thinly covered with a floating wisp or so of wool-like white hair; at the claw-like, shriveled, yellow hands, the stringy neck, the whole sexless meager wreck of what had been a woman. It was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human pity, and young disgust. She raised her voice:

"Did you not see those signs? Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher, didn't you see my sign-boards?" And as she looked down at him—Richard's blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body: and she what she was—she fell into one of those futile and dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head, and waved her claw-like hands, screeching insults and abuse.

The pity died out of Jelnik's face. He regarded her with his father's eyes, the calm, impersonal, passionless gaze of the trained alienist. She was an unlovely exhibition, to be studied critically. In some subtle manner she understood, for she jerked herself out of her anger, and fell silent, regarding him with a glance as brilliantly, deadly bright as a tarantula's. The cold, relentless hate of that glance chilled him. He forced himself to bow to her again, and to beat a dignified retreat, when his inclination was to take to his heels like a school-boy caught pilfering apples.

The next morning a bailiff presented Mr. Nicholas Jelnik with a notice forbidding him to enter the grounds of Hynds House without the written permission of the owner, and threatening prosecution should he disobey.

"The Hyndses, as I have said, are good haters," finished Judge Gatchell.

"And so she left Hynds House to me," said I without, I am afraid, much gratitude.

"It was hers, to dispose of as she chose." The lawyer spoke crisply. "If you have any scruples, dismiss them. My late client understood that it was far better for the estate to fall into the hands of a sensible woman like yourself than into the keeping of a young man with what foolish people like to call the artistic temperament, which in plain English means a person who can't earn his salt in any useful, sensible business.

"You doubt this? Let us consider this same artistic temperament and its results," continued the judge, making a wry face. "Once or twice it has been my bad fortune to meet it. One trifling scamp I have in mind, painted. A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board? Not at all, but messes he called 'The Sea,' one doesn't know why, save that the things slightly resembled raw oysters. However, the women raved over him. His laundress and his landlady had good cause to rave!

"He wrote, too. A text-book, a title, a will, a deed, a business letter? Far from it! He wrote poetry, if you please! The little wretch wrote poetry! That's what the artistic temperament leads a man to! Bah! I hate, I despise, I abhor, the artistic temperament!"

We looked at the judge, open-mouthed. "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"

"There have been times," admitted the judge, subsiding, "when I radically disagreed with my late client; when I opposed her strongly. But when she willed her whole estate to you, Miss Smith, instead of to Nicholas Jelnik, I heartily approved. Understand, I have no personal bias, no animosity against this young man; but he is, I am told, more or less of an artist, and one might as well leave an estate to an anarchist at once. I have expressed this opinion to the town at large, and I seldom express my opinion publicly," finished the old jurist stiffly.

I heard that opinion with mingled emotions.

"But we like Mr. Jelnik," I said at last. "The injunction against him doesn't hold water. Personally, I feel like apologizing to him."

"Oh, no! One can't afford to cuddle an old vendetta, as Abishag dry-nursed old King David. I always hated Abishag!" Alicia said naïvely.

"My late client," said the judge enigmatically, "hadn't counted on you." He almost succeeded in looking human when he said it, and his eyes upon Alicia weren't at all frosty. Then he folded his papers, replaced them in his wallet, wiped his glasses, shot his cuffs, hoped we'd find Hynds House all we'd hoped, hoped the town would be to our liking, hoped he could be of further service to us, bowed creakily, and took his departure.

"Sophy," said Alicia, after a long pause, "if ever I had to rechristen this house, I'd call it Hornets' Nest."

We had not attended church on our first Sunday, because we were too tired. But on our second Sunday we plucked up heart of grace and went to St. Polycarp's.

The old town wore an air of Sabbath peace and quietness infinitely soothing to the spirit. People passed and repassed us. We knew they knew who we were. The old gentlemen, indeed, bowed to us with stately uncoverings of the head; the rest regarded us with the sort of impersonal and perfunctory interest one bestows upon uninteresting passing strangers. Nobody spoke to us, though the eyes of the young men were not unaware of Alicia's fairness.

In a great city, of course, one takes that sort of thing for granted; but in this small town, where everybody knew and spoke to everybody else, the effect was chilling.

"Talk about the sunny South!" murmured Alicia. "Why, my teeth want to chatter!"

During the services I was conscious of covert glances in our direction, but whenever a pair of feminine eyes met mine, they slid off like lizards and glided another way, with calculated Christian indifference. They weren't hostile, nor unfriendly: they were just deliberately indifferent. Nobody had the faintest notion of being heedful of us strangers among them; and I should be sorry for angels who expected to be entertained unawares in South Carolina!

When the congregation had filed out and gone about its leisurely business, the minister and his wife came forward to greet us. They were a bit nervous, remembering the diabolic uproar about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Mr. Haile was a mild-mannered little man of the saved-sheep type, with box-plaited teeth and a bleating voice. His wife had the worried face and the anxious eyes of the minister's helpmeet, and the painfully ready smile for newcomers who might, or might not, prove desirable parishioners.

She wanted to be nice to us as a Christian woman to women, but not too nice as the minister's wife of a church whose members looked upon us as interlopers. I had deputed Judge Gatchell to inform the trustees that the suit was dropped. I suppose Mrs. Haile was timid about broaching the delicate subject, for she ignored it with a nervous intensity that made me feel sorry for her. She and Mr. Haile would call just as soon as it was convenient for us to receive visitors; and then they shook hands with us, and I think they breathed a sigh of relief.

"Oh, Sophy! And we've got to keep on going there!—next Sunday, and Sunday after next Sunday, and maybe every Sunday after that until we die! Perhaps after a while some of them will bow to us, or maybe even say, 'How do you do?' but we'll feel as if we'd been put in cold storage every time we enter that door!" wailed Alicia.

"It is our Father's house," I reminded her.

"But I don't want to be made to feel like a spanked child, in anybody's house!" Alicia said, resentfully.

"You say that because you're Irish."

"You say I say it because I'm Irish because you're English." Then she screwed up her mouth like a coral button, and squinted her eyes: "I'm Irish, and you're English, and we're both American. Sophy, let's join my Irish and your English to our Yankee, and teach this town a lesson!"

"Barkis is willin'. But in the meantime let's go home and see what Mary Magdalen has for lunch."

We walked slowly, enjoying the calm, lovely late-summer day. Hyndsville at its best was a big, green, sprawling old town, a quaint, unpainted, leisurely, flowery, bird-haunted place, with glorious trees, and do-as-they-please, independent gardens. Nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry, and at first we used to wonder how they ever got anything done, or kept pace with the moving world; yet they did. Only, they did it without haste and without noise. And they were always polite. Though they should take your substance, your reputation, or even, perhaps, your life, they would do it like ladies and gentlemen.

We paused a while, just inside the big brick-pillared gate, and looked up the oak-arched garden path toward our house. Of course one can't expect an old fortress of a brick house that's been neglected for more than three quarters of a century to look spick and span inside of a brief fortnight, but already Hynds House was sitting up, so to speak, and taking notice.

Life had begun to flow back into it. Mary Magdalen had brought a dog with her—a yellow dog of unknown ancestry, of shamefaced demeanor, a ropy tail, splay feet, and a rolling eye; named, she and heaven alone knew why, Beautiful Dog.

He shunned Alicia and me because we were white people: Beautiful Dog was intuitively aware that colored people's dogs must meet white people with suspicion, aloofness, and reserve. When we fatuously sought to make friends with him, he tucked his tail between his legs, and shivered as if we made goose-flesh come out on his spine; and once when I took him by his rope collar he fell down and shrieked. But just let Mary Magdalen roll out an unctious, "Whah is yuh, Beaut'ful Dawg?" and his ears and tail went up, he curveted, and made uncouth movements with his splay feet, and grinned from ear to ear.

Doctor Geddes's Mandy had brought over the black kittens and their mother. Mary Magdalen made sure of their staying at home by the simple process of buttering their paws. In South Carolina, when you want a cat to stay in your house, you butter its paws and let it lick the butter off leisurely, the while you whisper in its left ear: "Stay in my house for keeps, cat!" The cat will ever thereafter play Ruth to your Naomi.

Our cat was Mrs. Belinda Black, and her children were Potty Black and Sir Thomas More Black, this last being a creature of noble mien and a meditative turn of mind.

"Homage and praise to Bast, the cat-headed, the wise one, the great goddess!" purred Alicia, stroking Mrs. Belinda Black's satiny head. "And may Sekhet the Cat of the Sun aid me, a devotee at her shrine, to butter the paws of some two-legged cats in Hyndsville!"

"You-all's dinnah 's waitin'." Mary Magdalen stubbornly held to the notion that any meal eaten between breakfast and night was dinner; lunch being sandwiches and fried chicken taken out of a basket at church picnics and eaten out of one's hand, or lap, for choice. "What was de text to-day, Miss Sophy? Ah sort o' likes to chaw easy on a mout'ful o' text whilst Ah 'm washin' up mah dishes."

We gave her the text, which happened to be one that fills every negro's heart with undiluted joy: